A Normal Day On The Jigsaw Squad
by SALJStella
Summary: The people on the Jigsaw-case are a tortured bunch. They're dealing with death of family members, a feeling of inadequacy... Or they're just a heep of weird people dealing with Hoffman's and Strahm's love affair and Matthews' and Rigg's practical jokes.


**A/N: Okay, I know this is random, and completely unlike everything I usually write, but as a combination of watching the Saw movies too many times, and roleplaying them way too much, I just thought it'd be fun to take the overly serious, ridiculously depressing, Jigsaw-corrupted cops from the movies and see their every day life from a… Different perspective. XD This one's for the good people on facebook roleplay who made me look at the characters this way, even though they're going to hate me for it. Enjoy!**

**A Normal Day On The Jigsaw-Squad**

Erickson walked through the doors of the police station, making sure that his moustache and his Bluetooth were where they were supposed to, since he didn't function normally without them, and that he looked at the handle of the door closely before taking it. Rigg and Matthews had smeared toothpaste on it a couple of weeks ago, and the masturbation-jokes that followed when he came into the office with his hand covered in white, sticky mess was something he'd rather avoid.

He'd consciously made the decision to come to work a little later than he actually started. He'd always been on time before, but since Strahm and Hoffman finally stopped with their overcompensating hatred for each other and started having sex, instead, they hadn't been able to maintain themselves just because they happened to be at work. And walking in on them in… _That _position was another thing he could live without. If he at least came in a little later so they'd have time to finish, and thus didn't have to see it _again,_ at least he could start spending the rest of his life trying to get the image of the first time he'd seen it out of his head. Thank god that Hoffman and Strahm hadn't seen him, that'd been a bit too awkward.

It was a dysfunctional police station, yes. But still a police station. Even if they might've been more efficient if everyone who worked there wasn't… Well, either semi-psychotic or stuck at the age of five.

When he was inside, Erickson went straight to the office Strahm shared with Hoffman. He was sitting by his desk, with Kerry standing next to him, showing him something from a file. Strahm still had a ruffled hair, but had at least remembered to tuck his shirt in today. Good sign.

"Hey," Erickson said and closed the door behind him. "Is everything good in here?"

"Peachie keen," Strahm said. "We're going over the Jigsaw files again. Just out of curiosity, when are we going to stop pretending that we don't know that Hoffman's working for him?"

Erickson shrugged.

"He may be a psychopathic serial killer, but we're trying not to mix up personal life with professional life. Are Eric and Daniel here yet?"

"They came in early to record a new phony message on Hoffman's answering machine," Kerry said, with such patience that Erickson guessed you had to have if you were dating a guy like Matthews. "If you'd call Hoffman now, it'd clearly state that he has sex with unicorns."

Erickson put a fingertip on each of his eyelids, nodded with a heavy sigh, and left the room. Kerry looked after him with deep sympathy.

"How do you stand being together with Matthews, anyway?" Strahm asked and turned page in the file Kerry was holding. "I know he loves you, but his relationship with Rigg is fucking… Incestuous."

Kerry sighed, much like Erickson just had, and shook her head.

"They're still not having sex," she said and put the file away. "That I know of."

xxxxxxxxxxx

When Erickson entered Matthews' and Rigg's office, he found it to be empty. He rolled his eyes. It was one of _those _days…

"Well," he said in an exaggeratedly loud voice. "I guess Daniel and Eric aren't here yet."

A few suppressed giggles from under one of the desks. Aha.

"Then I'm just going to take a walk around the office to make sure everything's where it should be," Erickson went on and started walking towards the giggling desk. "Oh, look, there's Matthews' desk! I should probably get that homicide file from it…"

The giggles got so loud that the desk was basically jumping up and down. And, predictably, when Erickson got close enough, up popped Matthews and Rigg from hiding under there, yelling things that were probably supposed to scare him, but were a lot less frightening when they were cut off by their own snicker. Erickson looked from Matthews to Rigg as they did their stupid handshake-thing they did when they'd succeeded with a prank, and counted silently to ten to keep from knocking their heads together.

"Oh, look, Erickson's mad!" Matthews said when they'd calmed down enough to register the throbbing vein in their boss' forehead.

"He is," Rigg said with fake horrified expression. "What do you think he'll do?"

"Maybe he'll yell into his bluetooth?"

"Or work some of his scary moustache-powers?"

"Seriously, stop it," Erickson said and rubbed the tip of his nose.

They were good cops, he'd give them that much. But the bases he'd hired them on when they were younger - their maturity and ambition - were words he had to eat every day.

Hoffman and Strahm didn't exactly have the ideal way to deal with conflicts. Strahm usually flew off the handle and threw something into nearest wall, and Hoffman had a habit of going on a killing spree with a scalpel and a cup of coffee, but Matthews and Rigg had their own way to deal with frustration. Or just being bored.

If anyone messed with either of them - and "messing" usually meant going anywhere near the storage of sweets they had in their office - Matthews and Rigg would get back with a completely mindless, albeit annoying, practical joke. The answering message on Hoffman's machine was just a starter for the penalty he had to suffer for stealing some of Rigg's Sour Patch Kids. He'd also been forced to buy Rigg a whole new stock of the damn things (particularly the _red _ones!).

Erickson was just grateful that the water balloons filled with whipped cream that Matthews and Rigg had prepared to pummel Hoffman with following the Sour Patch-incident had never been used. But he did make a habit of staying clear of Rigg's candy after that.

"Unless you two have something very important revenge to take out on Peter for molesting some of your muffins," Erickson said as calmly as his mental state allowed, "maybe you could join us in Hoffman's office? We have a case we have to go over."

"Don't joke about that," Matthews said and exchanged a very serious look with Rigg. "Hoffman _did _lay hand on my carrot muffin a while back. I couldn't throw it away, since it was still a muffin, but… It just wasn't the same anymore."

"I know what you mean," Rigg said and shook his head. "You can eat it, and it still tastes the same… But you can't help but thinking that you're eating germs from a hand that's been on Strahm's…"

"Enough!" Erickson snapped. Damn, now that image was in his head again… "I'll… I'll get you some new muffins, okay? Can we please just go?"

Rigg and Matthews followed him out to the hall, where Erickson stopped by the coffee machine. He was about to pour himself a cup, but hesitated and gave Matthews a look.

"Do I want any coffee today?"

They exchanged one of those looks again.

"No, I wouldn't recommend it," Matthews said with a poorly hidden smirk and walked into the office.

Erickson cursed inwardly as he followed them, but he wasn't very surprised. It wasn't the first time those two had put baking soda/fish food/salt in the coffee at the station. He'd be more surprised if they survived that prank without Hoffman tearing their heads off. Coffee withdrawal never did good by him.

When Erickson closed the door behind him, Strahm and Kerry were sitting by their desks, and Matthews and Rigg were standing behind him, Matthews with his hands on Kerry's shoulders. Only one person missing.

"Where's Mark?" Erickson asked and walked up to his coworkers.

Before anyone managed to answer, the door opened. Hoffman stepped in, with his usual stone face, and a teddy bear under his arm. Kerry smiled, sensing a movie reference.

"You married?" she said and nodded towards the stuffed animal. Hoffman looked at her like she was an idiot.

"What?"

"Are you married?" Kerry repeated. Hoffman still looked completely dumbfounded.

"You know I'm not married, Kerry. We've worked together for years."

Kerry rolled her eyes.

"Yes, but you know in Saw IV, when you come in with a teddy bear, Perez asks if you're married, and you say: 'It's a short story, believe me…' I thought we were doing that."

Hoffman shook his head, seeming pretty unsure of Kerry's intelligence.

"That was just in the movie," he said and tightened his grip on the teddy bear. "This is my bear. His name is Snuggles."

"Mark," Erickson cut off, since he sensed that this could be a very long discussion if someone started pulling at that thread, "we're glad to have you here. Now, you want to take… Snuggles… And sit down?"

Hoffman took his teddy bear and his coffee cup - Erickson decided not to warn him about whatever Matthews and Rigg had put in it - and sat down on the edge of Strahm's desk. Erickson put his hands on his hips and eyed over the people before him.

"Right," he began. "As you know, we're up against a dangerous criminal. All we know about him is that he goes by the name 'The Muffin Man,' and he likes to cut his victims up in pieces, run them through a blender and spread them on a cake."

"This is so typical," Strahm interrupted. "Just because we're movie cops, it means that every murder we investigate has to be with some psycho that can't even butcher his victims in a normal way."

"Either way," Erickson said. "Point is…"

"That's true," Kerry said. "Ever since Hannibal Lecter, killers in movies can't just stab people, they have to murder in a ridiculously complicated way, like by draining them of blood with ballpoint pens and grind their bones into flour so they can make them into human bread."

"Kerry," Erickson said with a heavy sigh, "you should also know that the cops that chase after these killers in the movies listen to their bosses."

"Then it's a good thing we're in a fanfic right now."

"Shut up, Daniel. Anyway, I want Peter and Mark checking out the latest crime scene."

Hoffman grumbled something, while Strahm took the slightly more direct path and moaned out loud. They hadn't stopped going at each other's throat even after they'd started having sex, and Erickson wasn't sure if that was either because they honestly thought that people still didn't know about their relationship, or just because their relationship was just a love-hate one.

"I don't want to work with him!" Strahm exclaimed, with Hoffman sitting next to him with the same stone face as usual. "You always say that it's going to be a one-day thing, no big deal, and then you send us off to some god-forsaken place at the ass-end of nowhere to check out some stupid fucking evidence, and then we have to share a hotel room! And he _snores!" _

He threw out the last sentence like it was the ultimate torture. Hoffman glanced at Strahm from the corner of his eye with a slight smirk.

"That's not half as bad as when we have to share the bathroom in the morning, Strahm," he said calmly. "I don't know what it is you're doing in there, if it's fixing your comb-over or waxing your chest, but either way, you're in there for half an hour, and you come out surrounded by a fucking _cloud _of cologne."

Rigg and Matthews broke out in a giggle-explosion, and Strahm blushed in a way that clarified that at least one of the two options Hoffman had mentioned had to be accurate.

"Comes from the guys with lips like fucking Angelina Jolie," he bit back.

"You would know," Matthews smirked, earning a burning look from both Hoffman and Strahm.

"Yeah, seriously," Rigg said and took a Sour Patch Kid from the pack he had in his pocket. "Be more gay, you two. That's great."

Erickson exhaled shakily and bowed his head. He swore he felt blood pounding in his ears. How they got any work done at this fucking station, he'd never know, and even less did he know why he went back here every day. He had a vague memory of actually wanting to be a _cop _when he started working as one, and this wasn't really the right place for that. All he got was a severe headache, bad-tasting coffee and an ulcer from having to deal with these morons' disputes.

If they weren't so damn entertaining, he'd never put up with it.

"You're the ones to make gay jokes?" Hoffman snapped at Matthews and Rigg. "I know that we've all showered together, doing what we do, but you two have gotten it wrong. You don't have to do it when you're off duty."

"Speaking of comb-overs, how much product do you have in your hair, Hoffman? Enough to support a third world country?"

"ENOUGH!" Erickson roared, and everyone flinched, except for Hoffman, of course. His stone face was intact. Erickson was starting to doubt if that guy was human.

"Mark and Peter," Erickson hissed and turned to them, "everyone knows you're having sex. _Please _spend a little more of your time being cops, and a little less time overcompensating. And you two," he added and turned to Rigg and Matthews, "I haven't seen you two apart in so long, I'm not sure if you're still separate people, or have in fact grown together. It's not normal. Get help. As for the gayness: We all shower together, run around in uniforms, Kerry's the only woman here and no one's hitting on her. And _don't _tell me it's because she's together with Eric, you haven't done an honorable thing in your lives and that would not be where to start. So, in conclusion, we're _all _a little gay! Now, can we _drop _it and go work on this case?"

The room was dead silent for a moment. Erickson felt his words taking effect. Maybe these idiots did have some professional thinking in them, no matter how well they'd hidden it under practical jokes and crazy desk-sex over the years?

And then it came.

"You're almost cute when you're angry," Strahm said and petted Erickson's cheek as he walked past him. "Hoffman, let's go."

And here Erickson had thought that Hoffman didn't make one single move that wasn't controlled in a damn near robot-like manner. He almost stumbled to his feet in his eager to follow Strahm.

"He's always cute," Matthews said when he walked outside, too, with Rigg following suit. "It's the moustache."

Erickson sighed again and sat down on Kerry's desk. Maybe Mark working for Jigsaw wasn't the only reason why they never caught him…


End file.
